Flickr – CamerAgX – a new life for old gear

A few weeks ago I was writing that at least on Flickr, the make and model of the camera had very little influence on how an image was received.

Case in point.

Just before Thanksgiving, I posted a picture taken a few years ago in Atlanta’s Little Five Points neighborhood with a Pentax P3, a film camera that suffered a terminal failure a few rolls of film later (an issue with the film advance mechanism like most of the P3s, of course). The lens – the Pentax A 35-70 f/3.5-4.5 – was so bad I got rid of it (my copy was faulty – the lens has a decent reputation otherwise). The image was not that great either but was made more interesting in post-processing with Lightroom, and in a few weeks, it has become my most appreciated image of the year in Flickr.

I even received a request to use it from a pro-bicycle user group…. Go figure.

I’ve been traveling recently, and will be on the road again during the holiday season. I’m not forgetting this blog, in fact I’m harvesting more images for later use, but it’s very likely that this post will be the last one before Christmas.

Happy Holidays to you and to your families.

*Atlanta Little Five Points. Pentax P3/P30 – Pentax A 35-70mm f/3.5-4.5* – *the wall has been repainted since, and is far less interesting…*

*Trying to save a compromised image in Lightroom.*

More of the same series….Same camera, same lens, same roll of film.

*Another image from the same roll of film – Atlanta, Inman Park.*

*Ford Bronco II – Inman Park Neighborhood, Atlanta.*

More recent content in CamerAgX

What is Flickr and how does it work?

Flickr is a 20 year old photo hosting and sharing on-line service, functioning as a community for photographers. It is the home to approximately 110 million photographers, 55 million of them being regular users. I had been a Flickr early adopter back in the days, but had let my account go stale a long time ago (I felt that Flickr had lost their way after being acquired by a succession of poor suitors). The current owner of Flickr seems to have done a decent job at making it relevant again. I opened a new account in February and have been posting one or two images a day since then.

In the world of social media, Flickr is different:

Although Flickr offers free accounts, it only lets you post a maximum of 1,000 images for free, and I assume that most serious users pay for the so-called “Pro” subscription. The “Pro” subscribers are spared the ads that the “free” users have to endure.
Flickr offers very little for photographers who would like to directly monetize their images (or anything else for that matter) – Pro subscribers can include links to external (commercial) websites in the description of their images (the URL of their own storefront, for instance) but to a large extend Flickr is a commerce-free zone.
Lastly, even if there is a curated “Explore feed” (a gallery of photos which is regularly refreshed by an algorithm), Flickr subscribers are directed by default to their own “Activity feed”. The images which are proposed to you every day in your “activity feed” come exclusively from photographers you follow and groups you have subscribed to. As a Flickr user, you don’t feel you’re a captive audience; you have much more control on what reaches your “feed” than the average Facebook or Instagram user.

Financed to a large extent by the subscriptions of its “Pro” members, offering very few opportunities of monetization, and only marginally driven by algorithms, Flickr is a bad place for marketers, influencers, advertisers and click-bait hunters, which is pretty refreshing in the world of social media today.

I did not have a tele-photo lens I could mount on my Fujifilm mirrorless camera, so I brought an old Tamron Adaptall lens back in service, and mounted it on a Nikon D700. My highest view count on Flickr. *US Grand Prix 2022, Austin, TX*

How is Flickr measuring your audience: views and favorites

As a member of Flickr, you can not only look at the pictures posted by fellow photographers, but you are encouraged to also submit your own. Your contributions will be added to the “activity feed” of your followers, and, if you have submitted your image to a “group”, to the “activity feed” of all the members of that group. If they’re active on Flickr that day, there is a chance they will “view” the image you’ve posted.

Flickr do not encourage competition and won’t publish an official ranking of photographers, but, as a “Pro” member of Flickr, you are offered some statistics about your own audience, over a specific day, over a week, a month, or over the life of your account.

*Flickr – the daily stats – here, the views*

“Views” are a very flattering metric – is counted as a “view” any download of a specific image, irrespective of the time spent looking at it by the “viewer”.

Whether the image is closely examined by a fellow photographer interested in your creation process, or just browsed in one tenth of a second by a distracted scroller does not matter – “Views” are simply a reflection of the number of file downloads to the browser or the app of all end users.

The size of the image is not taken into consideration either: a thumbnail included in an email sent by Flickr to a distribution list will also count as a “View”, as long as the email has been opened.

In such an environment, a photographer with a large number of active followers will necessarily get more “Views” than another one with a smaller (or less engaged) follower population. And an image submitted to a multitude of groups will also have more chances to be “viewed” (that’s where an algorithm kicks in to prevent photographers from gaming the system by submitting a picture to hundreds of groups).

*Flickr – the images with the most views*

“Favorites”, on the other hand, counts the number of “Likes” a picture receives – it’s a humbling figure – an image can be viewed thousands of times (if submitted in enough active groups by a popular photographer), but only collect a few likes, or none at all.

I take pictures for pleasure, but I’m nonetheless interested in the feed-back of my peers – being able to see what clicks and what does not is one of the reasons to join a photographer community such as Flickr.

What makes an image “popular”? The subject and the groups to which the image is submitted are important, obviously, but does the equipment itself play a role? In other words, will my fellow photographers favor pictures taken with modern or expensive cameras, considering that they don’t know upfront what type of equipment was used? Is there a camera or a class of cameras that will harvest the most views and the most likes?

*Ranked #1 in “Favorites” (tied with three other pictures) – Pinup, a French Bulldog Photo taken in 2005 with a Pentax *ist DS and its 18-55 kit lens.*

Ranking by Views

I like to shoot with a bit of everything (like old cameras I buy on eBay or Shopgoodwill), but I have always had a recent “serious camera” for the important occasions, currently it’s a Fujifilm X-T4. Before the X-T4, I was shooting with a X-T1, and before that with a Nikon D80, which had replaced a Pentax *ist DS. I also shoot with a Nikon D700 from time to time (when I want to play with old Nikkor lenses), and with film cameras when I feel like it.

Now, the rankings…

Ranking by Views – the camera used to take my 10 most viewed pictures:

Image #1: shot with a Nikon D700
Image #2: shot with a Nikon D700
Image #3: shot with a Nikon D700
Image #4: shot with a Nikon D80
Image #5: shot with a Nikon D80
Image #6: shot with a Nikon D80
Image #7: shot with a Nikon D700
Image #8: shot with a Nikon D80
Image #9: shot with a Nikon D80
Image #10: shot with a Nikon D80

Surprising – it makes you wonder if I really needed to spend all that money upgrading to Fujifilm mirrorless cameras and lenses…

Views are a function of your number of followers, and to a certain extent to the groups you publish the picture to. If you publish an image to the “Nikon D700” or “Nikon D80″ group, you will reach more committed enthusiasts ready to look at images taken with the camera they love, than if you publish it to…”Industrial ruins of the Rust Belt” – and the view count will reflect that. Of course the subject matters – I had brought the D700 to a Formula One Grand Prix and to a trip to Istanbul, and I had spent a few weeks in Venice and Marrakech with the D80 – a glamorous sport and three exceptional cities are definitely attracting lots of viewers.

*Ranked #1 (it was a tie) for favorites, and #3 for views – Venice, on Dec 25th 2010 – Shot with a Nikon D80 and a Sigma 18-125 lens.*

Ranking by “Favorite” (top 10)

But the ranking of the number of “Favorites” shows a different … picture.

Images with the most favorites:

Tied for Rank #1, Image #1: shot with a Pentax *ist DS, Image #2: shot with a Nikon D80, Image #3: shot with a Nikon FE2 on color Film and Image #4: shot with a Holga on color film
then, tied for Rank #5, an image taken with a Canon Photura loaded with Ilford B&W film, another taken with an iPhone 15 Pro, an image shot with the Fujifilm X-T1, another by a Pentax K5 Mk2, a snapshot from a Nikon F3 loaded with B&W film, and last but not least a picture taken with the Fujifilm X-T4. All get the same number of “favorites”.

Film or digital, Nikon, Pentax or Fujifilm, recent or old, none of this seems to matter. A picture taken with a “Holga” ranks #1, while a photo taken by a very good “modern” dSLR (a Nikon D750 that I used for a few weeks) is #27. And the Nikon D700, which attracted so many viewers, could only convince very few of them to tag its images as “favorites” (its most favored image ranks at #63).

In a way, it is comforting. At least for an amateur photographer like me, gear does not matter that much. Or let’s say, the absolute performance of the camera – as measured in tests and discussed ad nauseam on Youtube or in specialized forums – is not that important.

*I like it, but it ranked low in views and likes – Petra, Jordan – June 2018 – Fujifilm X-T1*

If the camera does not really matter as far as the Flickr Views and Favorites are concerned, what does?

The subject? The user base of Flickr and the groups are so diverse that there is no specific subject that automatically brings views or favorites, like the videos of kittens on other social media platforms. No magic bullet to expect here.

Technically, and to a certain extent, the views and the favorites are dependent on how many people are scrolling their activity feed that day – you can have a superb picture and not garner many views or favorites, and because you’ve posted it on a slow day, or at the wrong time of day, or in groups with low or inconsistent attendance, it won’t have the viewers it deserves. You only learn with experience.

But then, assuming experienced Flickr users all have their personal little tricks to optimize their audience, what really makes the difference?

If you look at Flickr’s “Explore feed” and at what the photographers you follow are regularly posting in your “Activity Feed”, there are some really stunning images. Not necessarily perfect, technically. But different. Original, reflecting the vision and the personality of the photographer who created them. They make you stop, look at them, and say “wow!”

Invariably, these stunning images get lots of “Views” and lots of “Favorites”.

Because ultimately, it’s the eye and the heart of the photographer that make the difference.

Happy Thanksgiving.